Many people often find themselves in situations where, after having bought a new smartphone or some other consumer electronic device to replace an older device, they would like to conveniently and safely dispose of the old device. In many instances, such persons may desire to trade the old device for some monetary gain. Although they may use a service such as Ebay or the like to list and sell the old device, such avenues for disposing old devices are not convenient in that one must manually perform a number of steps such as listing the device for sale, monitoring purchase offers, provide the buyer with the device via mail or other manner, wait a relatively long time before receiving the money from the buyer, and even after the transaction has completed, still run the risk of subjecting oneself to adverse comments by the buyer and/or return of the device.
Distributed collection centers, such as collection kiosks (herein sometimes also referred to as “booths”) that are configured to accept a client's smartphone and to then provide the client with an amount of money corresponding to an estimated value are known, such as those provided by ecoATM™. However, further improvements are desired in order to make the process of trading in old consumer electronic devices more convenient for clients and more reliable and efficient for the kiosk operators (e.g., kiosk owners, entity responsible for collecting electronic devices from multiple kiosks for subsequent trading).
Embodiments disclosed in this application provide for remote distributed collection kiosks for efficiently collecting certain electronic devices.